TODAY ONLY: Tabletop gas grill on sale. Nice for camping, or for disaster-prep.
Archive for 2011
October 10, 2011
IF YOU BLINKED, YOU MISSED IT: Qwikster Is Gonester: Netflix Kills Its DVD-Only Business Before Launch.
NOT SO HOPEY-CHANGEY: The Solyndra Economy: Administration emails reveal the reality of politicized investing.
A FOLLOWUP ON THAT WIDENER LAW SCHOOL DEBACLE: “The two Widener University School of Law students named in a defamation suit by former professor Lawrence J. Connell are not only having their legal costs picked up by the school, but Widener has also agreed to pay the tab if the students are found to have defamed Mr. Connell and a jury hands up a judgment against them.” Dean Linda Ammons’ career to date has been expensive in terms of bad publicity; it seems it may prove financially expensive as well.
MICHAEL WALSH: Time To Start Taking Herman Cain Seriously? Ya think?
WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU DUG A DITCH, BABY? Reader Jim Robinette writes: “Why oh why has no one picked up Oingo Boingo’s ‘Capitalism‘ as the counter anthem to this idiocy?! The lyrics could not be more on point.” Well, we mentioned it before. But here you go again.
Herman Cain couldn’t have said it better.
Related: Capitalism: The Hated Enemy Of The Children Of The West. “Capitalism is the best economic engine for creating wealth and prosperity that has ever been developed. The West once was capitalist, but today it is a corporatist juggernaut in it’s death throes, whereby corporations and banks control the government in their favor, inevitably leading to corruption and decline. This is not capitalism. . . . The Occupiers in, at last count, 147 cities nationwide, protest a system that has been overtaken by corporations that are already in bed with the government anyway. If they have a problem with wealth, they should aim their frustrations at a government that sucked away trillions in tax-payer money for sinfully corrupt banks. Capitalism is not the enemy here, excessive government control and regulations is.” No, and our problems stem from too much corporatism, not too much capitalism. There’s nothing “capitalist” about Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and TARP. Or Goldman, Sachs for that matter . . . .
YEAH, THAT’S HOW IT LOOKS TO ME: TARP After Three Years: It Made Things Worse, Not Better.
THINGS YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED THIS WEEKEND, if you were out, you know, having a life or something.
My InstaVision interview of libertarian GOP Presidential Candidate Gary Johnson.
Student loans and the Occupy movement.
Pain of Job Crisis Reaches Well Beyond The Unemployed.
Pictures from the We Stand With Gibson Rally.
The coming Senate hearings on law school malfeasance.
Personally, I blame racism: Mark Steyn: Why don’t CNN, NPR, NY Times care about ‘dead Mexicans’?
Arizona sheriffs demand Fast-and-furious investigation.
Debt jubilee? Start with student loans.
Operation Counterweight: The Electoral Strategy For The Rest Of Us.
HAPPY COLUMBUS DAY: Many in the West will demonstrate their fierce originality and intellectual independence today by condemning Christopher Columbus using the same shopworn cliches they used last year. For those of a different bent, I recommend Samuel Eliot Morison’s Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus, which takes a somewhat different position. Here’s an excerpt:
At the end of 1492 most men in Western Europe felt exceedingly gloomy about the future. Christian civilization appeared to be shrinking in area and dividing into hostile units as its sphere contracted. For over a century there had been no important advance in natural science and registration in the universities dwindled as the instruction they offered became increasingly jejune and lifeless. Institutions were decaying, well-meaning people were growing cynical or desperate, and many intelligent men, for want of something better to do, were endeavoring to escape the present through studying the pagan past. . . .
Yet, even as the chroniclers of Nuremberg were correcting their proofs from Koberger’s press, a Spanish caravel named Nina scudded before a winter gale into Lisbon with news of a discovery that was to give old Europe another chance. In a few years we find the mental picture completely changed. Strong monarchs are stamping out privy conspiracy and rebellion; the Church, purged and chastened by the Protestant Reformation, puts her house in order; new ideas flare up throughout Italy, France, Germany and the northern nations; faith in God revives and the human spirit is renewed. The change is complete and startling: “A new envisagement of the world has begun, and men are no longer sighing after the imaginary golden age that lay in the distant past, but speculating as to the golden age that might possibly lie in the oncoming future.”
Christopher Columbus belonged to an age that was past, yet he became the sign and symbol of this new age of hope, glory and accomplishment. His medieval faith impelled him to a modern solution: Expansion.
Morison’s book is superb, and I recommend it highly as an antidote to the simplistic anti-occidental prejudice of today — which, as Jim Bennett has noted, has roots that might surprise its proponents:
This is primarily an effect of the Calvinist Puritan roots of American progressivism. Just as Calvinists believed in the centrality of the depravity of man, with the exception of a minuscule contingent of the Elect of God, their secularized descendants believe in the depravity and cursedness of Western civilization, with their own enlightened selves in the role of the Elect.
Indeed. Nonetheless, Bennett thinks that a different Italian deserves the real credit. (Reposted from 2005, but it still fits.) [Doesn’t this leave you vulnerable to charges of recycling too? –ed. I prefer to think of it as “They came at us in the same old way, and, you know, we beat them in the same old way.”]
I post this every year, as it’s evergreen. The original link to Bennett’s column seems to have succumbed to link-rot, but I believe this is it.
UPDATE: I haven’t read it, but a reader recommends Columbus: The Four Voyages, too.
WAS THE FIX IN FOR Ron Paul’s straw-poll victory at the Values Voter conference? His people are very good at straw polls.
THE HILL: Issa: Holder being ‘disingenuous’ on Fast and Furious program. Ya think?
Related: Eric Holder Hits Bottom, Keeps Digging. “A similar scenario played out last summer when CNN reporter Dana Bash asked questions of the arrogant Anthony Weiner to uncover the truth behind the sexting scandal. Weiner called for the cameras, but then struggled to talk his way out of his problems. We all know how that turned out.”
Also: “And you should ask yourself, ‘My God, what have I done?'”
Plus, Joe Arpaio, missing in action.
“ARAB SPRING:” Egyptian Army Vehicles Run Over Coptic Protesters in Cairo.
UPDATE: Islamists Storm Tunisian University.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Egypt Descends Into Chaos. “No-one appears in charge. Central bank foreign exchange reserves are down to just $19 billion, or four months’ imports, the Financial Times reported last week. . . . Egypt literally will run out of food. It imports half its caloric consumption, mainly wheat (although Egyptians eat less wheat than Iranians, Moroccans, Canadians, Turks and Russians). Egypt spends $5.5 billion a year on food subsidies. Its social solidarity minister wants to change the system (which subsidizes some people who can afford to pay more than the penny a loaf the government charges), but seems deeply confused. ‘We need to change consumer habits so that we are not consuming so much bread. In Mexico, for example, they rely more on potatoes. Why can’t we start shifting toward that?’ said Saad Nassar, adviser to the agriculture minister. Mr. Nassar seems unaware that Mexicans eat more corn than wheat or potatoes. This discussion would be comical if not for the fact that Egypt is about to run out of money to pay for any sort of food.”
As Roger Simon noted yesterday, the Arab Spring is a horror show.
EUROPE ON THE BRINK: “It’s probably worth interrupting your regularly scheduled unemployment-and-kitchen-blogging to point out that it all really seems to be coming to a head. . . . To paraphrase Oscar Levant, there is always a fine line between a banking panic, and a sovereign debt crisis–and Europe has erased that line.”
GALLUP: Obama’s Approval Only 30 Percent Among Pure Independents. “Only 30 percent of pure Independents—those Americans who say they do not belong to or lean toward either the Republican Party or the Democratic Party–told the Gallup poll during September that they approved of the way President Barack Obama is handling his job as president.”
RECOVERY BUMMER (CONT’D): Recession Officially Over, US Incomes Kept Falling. “Between June 2009, when the recession officially ended, and June 2011, inflation-adjusted median household income fell 6.7 percent, to $49,909, according to a study by two former Census Bureau officials. During the recession — from December 2007 to June 2009 — household income fell 3.2 percent. The finding helps explain why Americans’ attitudes toward the economy, the country’s direction and its political leaders have continued to sour even as the economy has been growing.”
Hey, Goldman Sachs is doing okay.
WHY HOLLYWOOD is demonizing businessmen. “Nazis are getting old, moviemakers don’t want to offend foreign audiences, so corporate types top the list of evil stereotypes.”
UPDATE: A reader from Taipei writes:
Wall Street is no longer the sole playground of rich American white boys of the upper crust. The senior management of every bank on the street is more diverse than most university administrations. I do not think the Indian, Chinese, Russian, Japanese, and many others are all that thrilled with being the whipping boys for the American left. It is not an automatic that expansion means adding headcount in NYC. And if this continues I think in a year or so we could see banks deciding that all Wall Street gets is a trading floor. I mean if CNBC can sit in New Jersey why can’t Merrill Lynch or Nomura sit in Charlotte or Knoxville. You can do most of what you need to do outside of NYC now, why deal with NY lawyers, Attorney Generals, and now smelly people blocking your way to work?
I expect this is already a marketing line from Hong Kong, Singapore, and soon to be from Knoxville, Dallas, and other palces that seek to attract business rather than rant about it..
Yeah, and there’s no real reason not to move the trading floor, either.
TOM MAGUIRE: Metaphor madness:
My goodness – next these messaging geniuses will have Obama delivering a big speech at 7 PM and declaring “It’s sunset in America”.
Let’s note that their Arab counterparts were not hung up on silly literalism. Even though the Tahrir Square demonstrations took off on January 25, no one was so foolish as to dub this the “Arab Winter”. Spring is a season of hope and renewal (bear with me while I beat the obvious like a rented mule). Autumn is football and turning leaves and the Yankees going out in five, but it is not normally associated with a better tomorrow; quite the contrary, actually, since the cold and death of winter is around the corner, not to mention the NHL season and the return of the NY Knicks.
Now, plenty of Obama’s critics believe he and his many buds on the American left have been pining for an end to American exceptionalism since they donned their first Che t-shirt, so the notion of an “American Autumn” is probably quite dear to their hearts. That puts “American Autumn” in the category of a Kinsley gaffe. But this is not a message that will win the hearts and minds of the Great Unwashed.
It’s not even the winter of our discontent.
SECRET DEATH MEMO: Reader Mike Fitzmorris emails, “What would John Yoo have said?”
The Obama administration’s secret legal memorandum that opened the door to the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born radical Muslim cleric hiding in Yemen, found that it would be lawful only if it were not feasible to take him alive, according to people who have read the document. . . .
It was principally drafted by David Barron and Martin Lederman, who were both lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel at the time, and was signed by Mr. Barron. The office may have given oral approval for an attack on Mr. Awlaki before completing its detailed memorandum. Several news reports before June 2010 quoted anonymous counterterrorism officials as saying that Mr. Awlaki had been placed on a kill-or-capture list around the time of the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner on Dec. 25, 2009. . . . The document’s authors argued that “imminent” risks could include those by an enemy leader who is in the business of attacking the United States whenever possible, even if he is not in the midst of launching an attack at the precise moment he is located.
This is all sounding kinda familiar, somehow. . . .
Related: “Gosh, who knew that John Yoo had gone back to work for the Obama Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, writing memos under the nom de plumes ‘David Barron’ and ‘Martin Lederman.'” It’s “Marty” to those of us who knew him in law school. . . .
Plus, John Yoo himself weighs in: “We should be thankful that Obama officials have quietly put aside the arguments they made during the Bush years that any terrorist outside the Afghani battlefield was a criminal suspect who deserved his day in federal court. By my lights, I would rather the Obama folks be hypocrites in favor of protecting the national security than principled fools (which they are free to be in the faculty lounges both before and after their time in government).”
Ouch.